Absolutely. The phone system is totally broken. A few years ago I disabled the incoming call part of my phone to everyone except a few family members and my wife. So far it's been great. Everyone who needs me emails me. I've yet to run into a situation where someone I needed to hear from would only call me.
Just not willing to do this. I never want to miss a call from someone talking about an emergency with a family member, the FAA calling about an unclosed flight plan, a recruiter (if job hunting), a delivery person, etc. I answer virtually all unknown numbers except the ones T-Mobile puts in as “Scam Likely.”
What I do not understand is, given that the phone is a computer, why there is not an on-phone IVR which can solicit a brief intro. I mean, I had tech that could do that for a landline 25 years ago.
The problem with this for me is my voicemail is now so full of spam messages from numbers I don't answer or block that I can't ever get any useful messages if there are any. A lot of the time my inbox remains full and I can't actually receive new voicemails. It's just gotten to the point where the new voicemail icon has become a permanent fixture on my notification bar I totally ignore.
I've never heard of this before. Unfortunately after checking it out, it looks like my carrier only offers it for iphones. This does look like a handy feature though.
Google Voice will transcribe any VMs and send them as a text. The transcription is good enough to know if it's someone you need to call back or add their number to your block list.
It can't transcribe the Chinese scam calls that I get 5x daily, though. I've taken to answering every call again recently because my family has some health stuff going on. Otherwise, I have to physically listen to every voicemail to ensure that I didn't miss an important call because someone in the hospital had a thick accent or any other benign software issue related to NLP problems.
I wholly disagree. The system as it works today is miles better than a circular buffer. People trying to leave new voicemails are informed that there is no more room and thus they know that if it is important they should try calling back later.
If it just deleted old entries then it's possible someone left an important message and assume you'll hear it but then it just gets silently deleted.
Imagine if PC storage devices worked this way, it'd be chaos.
Use the 'this number not in use' tones (http://www.k3pgp.org/telezap.htm) as I described in my reply to 'SomeHacker44' above. That cuts out many (most?) garbage voicemails.
There's two I get regularly. One is from people pretending to be the Canada Revenue Agency. The other is a message in Cantonese, that according to my coworker who gets them too, is from someone pretending to be from the Chinese embassy basically saying the same thing as the fake CRA one. That you owe money and a lawsuit is being prepared under your name, without actually mentioning your name. The one from the 'CRA' is almost comical. It sounds like something a child would say. I've talked to the government enough to know how they talk. They also don't use odd voice concealing effects typically.
I actually called the number the CRA one left back once and a person with a French accent answered pretending to be from the CRA. I just said if they called my number again I was going to report them to the rcmp and then hung up. It stopped for a few months after that. I'm assuming if it was actually Canada revenue, they would have called back. All I was getting were the Cantonese ones. The CRA ones only started again recently.
> why there is not an on-phone IVR which can solicit a brief intro.
Google has that, but I'm not sure if it's on-phone.
I'd wager someone could write an app to do this.
I would probably pay $50 for an on-phone version of Lenny; basically a voice-based chat-bot that keeps spammers occupied, without having to conference another number in.
I don't understand what's meant by on-phone, but the google feature asks the caller to introduce themselves and why they're calling, and transcribes the response for the user to read in realtime.
I use it for every number I don't know, and so far it's been 100% successful (in the sense that, afaik, no one who I wanted to hear from has hung up on Google Assistant).
heard a review of this app a few days ago that reminded me of Lenny https://www.robokiller.com/ - apparently the conversations it spews out are pretty hilarious also. Annoyingly I can't figure out what the subscription rate is, but can try it for a week for free
I've been using this for the last 3 weeks and it works really well. It has blocked 21 spam calls up to now. After the free week they charge $30 yearly or $4 monthly.
You can set the spam calls to be answered with selected funny time-wasting recordings, but since that would be embarrassing if I get a call from a professional contact, I set them to be answered with a plain fax tone.
Now I am back to being able to pick up all calls that ring.
Not sure if the voice generation is actually happening on the phone but Call Screen is not conferencing in anyone AFAIK. It's pretty seamless. You get an automatic transcription interface to see what the caller is saying in real time, and can choose to pick up, ask some canned questions, get them to clarify what they said, or mark the number as spam and hang up. Often when I've suspected a spam call and started a Call Screen, they just hang up (which I consider a success).
(My opinions are my own, not necessarily those of my employer.)
What I want, though, is an interactive bot, running on my phone, that will eat up telemarketer's time by pretending to be a real person, and responding to them in such a way as to keep them on the line for as long as possible.
I want to pick up a call from a scumbag, tell them, "hang on, let me get my dad", and press the "fuck you" button - which puts a fake doddering old man on the line for them to talk to instantly, without any more intervention required from me.
I've done this for my home phone number with Twilio using Studio. The last 2 options forward the call to mine or my wife's cell numbers. Everyone seems to hang up when they hear the IVR - neither of us have gotten a call forwarded from Twilio in over 2 months.
I realize this doesn't do much for your cell number already in the wild but if you want to migrate people over to a number that screens before routing to you, it's possible to do on the cheap.
I ported my landline number to Callcentric partially just to rid myself of the AT & T $75/mo charge and partially because of Callcentric's call handling.
Callcentric (and I'm sure others) allow call routing rules which include inputs for spam ranking, whitelist and IVR routing. You can upload your contacts, whitelist those for passthrough and then send anyone else to a simple "please press <fixed digit|random digit> " prompt first before routing to you if they pass the test.
Set up your phone such that when you don't answer a call from a number you don't recognise, it will go to voicemail.
Set up your voicemail answering message to contain only two things: the tones that signify "This Phone Number Not In Use" (see http://www.k3pgp.org/telezap.htm) and a terse voice message, such as "Leave a Message", which imparts no usable information to the caller.
Now when the call goes to voicemail, two things happen: First, any robocallers will hang up when the hear the 'Not in Use' tones. Second, any humans will hear the 'Leave a Message' and they now have two options which are to hang up, or to leave a message asking you to call back.
You merely have to scan the voicemail messages and call back only those ones you choose to answer. The other 80% or more have been discarded 'automatically' before you get to hear them.
How many calls are you actually getting? Even if it's one a day, who h seems extremely high, is it really that much effort to lose the 5 seconds it takes to answer and hang up straight away?
Depends. At some point, I was getting one about every two hours. Got a call rating/blocking app then, and hey presto, they all get blocked automagically. Machine v. machine: fatality! Apparently word gets around, as even the attempted calls decreased after about a month.
(And yes, I would probably be juggling significant state at the usual calling times; pushing and popping all that is far more than 5 seconds, even if that were completely lossless)
anecdotal: I've been getting 2-5 spam/scam calls per day. I cancel any incoming call that I don't recognize or am not expecting. The alternative is disruptive (leaving my desk, finding an empty conference room, answering, etc). The interruption costs far more than the time it takes to resolve.
There was an article on here a few months ago about how the organ donor system works. If you are on the list to receive an organ you get a phonecall and if you miss this call the organ goes to the next person on the list who picks up the phone.
Given the time constraints around organ donation and transplantation, this seems reasonable. If you only have a couple of hours before the organ is no longer viable you can't reasonably sit around hoping someone will return your call.
Ideally, you should be alerted that your position on the waitlist is approaching so that you know to answer any incoming calls in case it's "the one". I have no idea if this reflects reality however.
> Ideally, you should be alerted that your position on the waitlist is approaching...
I'm not sure the false hope would be an improvement. Unfortunately there are a whole bunch of emotional considerations that need to be made in this case.
Do you have any concerns over being an emergency contact for anyone? I've considered doing the same as you, but I fear the chance that a I would be contacted in such a scenario and wouldn't even know it.
I'm pretty sure if it was an emergency, they would leave a message. For me, that's good enough.
Once the phone companies fix caller authentication, I'll probably be comfortable letting my guard down a bit. Correct caller ID would make my phone far more valuable and I'm always surprised that the big telecom companies don't compete on voice services more.
Yeah, because when your spouse is getting rolled into emergency surgery after suddenly collapsing you'll definitely know what number is going to call you to inform you, so you'll want to whitelist that one. And when a drunk driver hits her car on a rural road in the middle of the night and her phone is trapped in the wreck, you'll want to make sure you whitelist the phone number of the passerby that stops to help. And when your elderly parents' house is burning down (along with their phones) you'll definitely know all the phone numbers of all possible emergency responders and neighbors, so whitelist all of them too.
That's not even considering mundane everyday stuff like delivery people/repair people who got lost or have to reschedule last minute. You might have the main number for the business whitelisted, but those sorts of calls usually come from the phone number of the day's driver.
The only people who think "just disable incoming phone calls" is a viable option either have no friends and/or family, very little life experience, or both.
I would think the more likely scenario in this case would be to work through the list of emergency contact numbers (ie. cell phone, work phone, home phone) in succession rather than calling the same number twice.
The problem is unless you have a home phone, you already can't rely on cell phones to have every call come through. Calls do not connect all the time, and end up going to VM anyway.
If people want to contact me, they can leave a message on my voicemail.
The only people who think "just disable incoming phone calls" is not a viable option either have no decent friends and/or family, very little life experience, or both.
You never know who's going to call from what number. Just yesterday I had a carrier I hired call me from the shipper's landline because the situation was going sideways and there was no cell service.
That's not really feasible. You might know for which persons you are the emergency contact but you can't possibly know from which phone you would be contacted in case of an actual emergency.
My doctors either send email with a link to their secure messaging portal (meh) or a push notification to their mobile app which contains a messaging capability (much better).
This is much better than the old days of phone-only contact.
I use a variation of your system with two phones. One is like yours and I always hawe it with me, turned on. The second is for everyone else - delivery people, banks etc. I have it muted except if I expect a call. Every couple of days I check it only to find that there were no important calls. Once a year someone leaves a message and I call them back. This system works great, I don't remember when was the last time I had to deal with scammers and other people wasting my time.
Well, actually you cannot know for sure. If the person trying to call you has only your phone number as a mean to contact you, you cannot possibly know if their are trying or not to contact you.
I understand you are assuming they are going to escalate somehow to get to you, but maybe it can't just be possible in some scenario.
> How to avoid this scam: Don't answer or return any calls from numbers you don't recognize.
Unfortunately, this isn't great for a number of reasons:
1) The last two times I got a series of missed calls every two hours from somebody who didn't leave a voicemail, it was my credit card company (a different company each time) calling to ask me about a number of suspicious charges on the other side of the country that I sure as hell didn't make (I distinctly remember saying, on one such occasion, "What the hell is a Sheetz?"). Both of those times lead to me having my card declared stolen and the bogus charges reversed. If I didn't answer, I probably wouldn't have noticed the bogus charges.
2) My employer covers a large chunk of my phone + Internet bills. This is so I can answer emergency calls from our NOC whenever one of the important applications my team maintains goes kablooey. The whole thing with Android not resolving people's numbers right away includes them, as well. The call comes in as a long string of numbers, and if I miss it, it takes a few minutes before the long string of numbers resolves to a name on my contacts list. I'd rather not develop a reputation for snubbing our internal customers, especially not when they have an emergency.
> a series of missed calls... from somebody who didn't leave a voicemail, it was my credit card company
This is a huge part of why this system doesn't work. Perhaps 95% of the calls I get from unknown numbers either produce informative voicemails or are scams. But the ones that don't are often the most important calls I get, from sources like credit card companies and doctors. Depressingly often, the numbers they're using aren't even listed online to look up later.
Why do you use a credit card from a company that
(a) does not how to email you or notify you via app, and (b) dumps their fraud protection back onto you by forcing you to handle number misuse; and if the problem was actual fraudulent use, your card woud be canceled so how would reaching you on the phone help, as the response to fraud is to cancel your card # and issue another one?
That's weird. I can understand not returning, since then you're the one originating and thus getting charged for the call, but for answering? Is there any landline service that charges for non-collect incoming calls?
I can't find any evidence of major carriers doing this. There's discussion online to the effect that this has been true, but it looks like it was mostly a weird episode during the rise of cellphones where a call could be long distance but billed to the caller at normal rates, so the carrier would try to collect from the recipient.
If anyone knows of a scam in which simply picking up a call can produce extra costs, they should definitely share!
I can’t imagine why anyone ever answers the phone. I get at least ten robocalls every weekday. I don’t ever look at my voicemail and I haven’t answered a call in ages.
Edit: I know I’m not alone because CNN just released a poll with no responses from people under the age of fifty, because they couldn’t reach enough of them by phone.
I answer the phone because people who I have to be responsive to call it.
I'm currently getting a visa, if someone involved in the decision making process calls my number I better answer it.
I was interviewing for a job not that long ago, when people get back to me by the phone I better answer it.
When my dentist or doctor calls to schedule an appointment I need to answer it.
If a family member needs to get my attention a phone call works better than text - the ringtone is more noticeable.
Of course I live in Canada and my number isn't scattered everywhere on the web, I don't think I even get a robocall a week on average. But even if I lived in the states, I don't see how I could avoid the first two requiring I answer my phone sometimes, possibly the third as well but at least I'm the client there so I might be able to talk them into an alternative means of contacting me.
I do t disagree with you that answerinf your phone can be necessary, but most of your examples are cases where you are expecting a call - except your doctor/dentist. Why are they calling you and not you calling them to make appointments?
Semo-related but it's infuriating how many companies refuse to contact you by email. I'm currently remortgaging a flat, and I've told the broker repeatedly to contact me by email, and they still phone, leave a voicemail asking to be called back, and send an email saying they called.
A lot of the times when people make it a point to call you it is to avoid leaving an email trail. In litigious environments it serves a purpose. You may argue that calls may be recorded as well but it is far less likely and much harder to search through them the way you can do through email.
Where I live, the doctor/dentist/optometrist never calls me first. They may call me back, but I always call them first. Recently I had some blood tests done and the doctor told me to give them a call in a week. I did, let the receptionist know I was calling about test results and she called me back after getting the details from my doctor. I’ve never got a call from any of them without expecting it because I’ve initiated it.
They sometimes call me to shift appointments. Either something came up for the doctor and they're moving the appointments away, or someone needs a longer very urgent procedure just before my appointment and I'm just going to be there for routine stuff.. things like that.
My spouse is a physician and makes these calls to patients all the time. Might be different in your area but it's been pretty common in the couple states we've lived in.
I don't think you expect a call from immigration when they are handling your application, they just call if they want to ask you why line # doesn't look the way they expect it to.
The broker thing has happened the same way with me, the last two times I've done so.
I'm starting to believe they don't want certain things in black and white so they would rather call you. It could just be policy though, who's to say.
I do still find it irritating that they insist. I'm much more likely to respond to an email quickly than to a phone call and I only answer phone calls from my family while I'm at work.
It also has to do with personality type. A sales type person is more likely a people's person that has more control over a voice communication than a typing conversation. They want to be able to directly counter your indecisiveness to land the sale, they can't do that in an email
That makes a lot of sense. I find it highly irritating though. I'm paying these people to do a job for me, I expect it done without further inconveniencing me. The last solicitor I instructed ended up leaving me with more work than had I not paid him to do anything.
Had an accountant that adopted some new platform and communication technique. Anytime I'd email, he would record a video and send back a link to a video. The videos weren't (easily) downloadable, and would expire pretty quickly. So... I never had anything useful to trace through history in. I switched accountants. New one is fine with answering basic questions about stuff via email. He will call sometimes, but it's not a requirement, and he certainly won't send videos.
Mind boggling. Clearly he was trying to stand out, with his video responses, but that's just irritating, you could click a short email and read it in seconds on your phone almost anywhere, or, you have to wait until a time suitable to watch with audio.
it seemed to be part of some larger 'communication and marketing' package he was subscribed to. I was getting monthly email updates, etc - ghostwritten by someone else. It wasn't bad, but video responses to everything was annoying. It felt like he was intentionally trying to hide something.
I have that disabled. Either they contact me via a more modern communication line, or I contact them when it suits me. If I need a doctor appointment, I phone my doctor (or well, his secretary).
If you’re talking about the CNN poll on Democratic Presidential candidates, then that’s a colossal mis-statement of the facts. They definitely did have people under 50 in the poll. There was a Facebook post making the rounds that took a single chart from the methodology statement and claimed that nobody under 50 was polled, incorrectly. I encourage you to read the full polling statement, available online, to see that’s not the case.
All of that said, yes, pollsters do have to do more work to survey younger people. They have recently added cell phones to their call lists, since land line phones are going the way of the dodo.
I don't think I've misrepresented the outcome of the poll at all. Even after lumping together 18-49 year old respondents, an unusually coarse cohort spanning several generations, they still didn't have enough responses to get statistical power.
First, I don't see any table that lumps all responses 18-49. I do see a column for <45.
Second, the tables that show responses for all respondents do include values (not N/A) for all age groups, meaning that across the n=1000 poll there are > 125 respondents in each age group, meaning that at minimum 250 people out of the 1000 in the poll are under 50.
The categories that do have N/A are in questions that select for only Democratic or Democratic-leaning independents who are registered to vote -- which is only 411 respondents out of the poll. And that one does have a lot of N/A's, including in the < 45 column. Having N < 125 under 45 in a sample size of 411 people is disappointing, but hardly the same as "no responses from people under 50", which is what you wrote. It also doesn't mean that those responses weren't included in the poll, only that they didn't feel confident to break them out separately.
I don't understand why the phone companies don't do more prevent this kind of thing in the USA.
In New Zealand, I have had periods where spam phone calls have been pretty bad for me. 2 or 3 a day for a week or so, and that was annoying.
But they always seem to stop.
The last spam call I got was long enough ago that it doesn't show up in my iphones call history. Certainly several months ago.
Can't the phone companies look at calls the same way email providers do and use all the information they have at their disposal to filter out the spam?
A bunch of carriers like tmobile and att can filter spam at their network. I was getting 5+ a day so I'm testing tmobiles name ID. But it's an extra $4/month when it should be included.
Most people just use hiya and all of the apps that community source the blocking. Tbh my experience is probably better with those.
This appears to be the new-style of "American innovation". You junk something up, break it, or otherwise make things worse and then take your cut out of restoring something resembling the status quo. Living in a gangster's paradise...
Why does anyone spend the time to answer a poll for a for-profit company? I bet the person making the call is being compensated but they want the callee’s time for free?
The surveyors may not want to represent/hear about the interests of people too bothered to do things that take time without pay (e.g. voting or vaccination, which should also be paid imo).
The company doing the poll will often misrepresent themselves IME.
"Do you have a minute to talk about your phone service, we're calling from your provider."
OR
"We're finding out for the government about voter preferences."
That sort of thing. People thing they may have an obligation to the company.
UK government do a paper-based survey of businesses for which there is a legal obligation (backed by a fine) to respond, but it appears when you first get it just like one of these scammy polling companies.
This question reminds me of Kraftwerk's method of using a phone. I'd love a mobile phone that did this;
>When the German electronic band Kraftwerk were in the studio, they refused to be disturbed. Working for hours on end, patiently perfecting their sonic arrangements, required zero interruptions. So much so that they even took the ringer out of the only telephone in the studio. So what happened when someone wanted to call them? Simple. If someone wanted to speak to them when they were working in the studio, the band would instruct that person to call at a precise time - not 2 minutes before and not a couple of minutes after, but exactly at that time. Then, at that precise time, a member of the band would stop what they were doing, walk across the studio, pick up the none ringing phone and say ‘Hello’ and the call would begin. That’s the only way you could get to speak to them. You made an agreement. You said what you were going to do and then you did it.
Intriguing, but in order to lift the phone at the precise time they'd need to have some form of alarm or notification. At which point, their concentration would be interrupted.
Even if they set an alarm, that is a lot less distracting than the phone being able to ring at any time. Besides, any time I set an alarm, I’m already aware of approximately when it will go off and the alarm is just to pinpoint the exact moment. Ie if the alarm is to go off at 2pm, I don’t think about it until maybe 1pm or later as the time starts to approach.
One known and pre-timed distraction is a lot less distracting than many unknown randomly-timed distractions.
As a kid my barber didn't have a phone. He figured if he was on the phone he wasn't servicing his customers so he never had one installed (he retired just a cell phone came down to where normal people could afford to use them for voice calls). A couple times a his family did call the bar across the street and the waitress would walk over and relay the message (he probably closed shop for the day every time that happened).
Telephones are useful for a lot of things, but they are not quite as critical as you think.
For me, when playing/recording, it would really distract me (more than e.g. having a phone in silent mode so that when flow mode ends, I notice I'm hungry and need to wake up to the outside world, I can see who has tried to call).
The Kraftwerk description sounds a bit eccentric to me. Their business model is about being eccentric, so no surprise there.
>For me, when playing/recording, it would really distract me
I think this might be easier if you are working as a group and have a big clock on the wall. I am a rubbish instrumentalist, but do hang around with a hell of a lot of musicians, and 'how long was that' does seem to be one of the most commonly asked questions of each other when they are in a studio. Also, if paying for a studio, they generally become very good at estimating the current time.
Sure, but I think things like "we can now do one take and then it's phone call o'clock" would set an unnecessary pressure to the performance. That's just me of course.
Calls I make are split ~50/50 between personal, to people who know me and have my number, and business, when I either want to buy something or resolve some issue. Calls I receive are split 40/60 between personal and spam. And I'm in Europe. In the US, from what I hear, that would be closer to 10/90.
There's a huge asymmetry in phone use. Marketers and scammers make the phone network near-unusable to regular people, by ensuring most of the calls they receive are unwanted.
I'm in Germany and I'd say I get one call a month from somebody who wants to do a survey or something like that.
And I also might get one spam SMS per month which I report to the "Bundesnetzagentur", which will then take care of that as this is prohibited in Germany.
I regularly get a survey call and "congratulations, you won a vacuum cleaner/spa/whatever" call roughly once a month. From time to time, I get some company I'm technically in business with call me (through an outsourced call centre), trying to upsell something useless. I used to get a lot more of calls like these a couple years ago, but I vaguely recall something in the legislation having changed since then, and most spam calls disappeared.
That said, a year ago I started my own business, and now the cold calling just doesn't stop. In Poland AFAIK it's illegal to spam individuals, but it's legal to spam businesses - and now I have, for example, Polcard (card processor) representatives calling me roughly once a month, asking if maybe I'd like a POS terminal. I keep saying them, I'm a contractor, I only do B2B and don't need a terminal - they note this down, and call again the next month.
So currently it all adds up to ~10 +/- 5 unwanted calls a month. It's still usually more than personal calls I receive (but less than personal or business calls I make). Rise of the mobile-connected IMs pretty much put a stop to most personal phone calls among the people I know.
> In Poland AFAIK it's illegal to spam individuals
Still happens despite of regulations and it wouldn't be that bad if you just could get the info from person calling you, who got your number and demand removal from database but as you probably know, they love to hang up the second they hear this question. I've heard that the newest trick is to give the victim the premium service number saying "that's how you can get your phone number removed".
Personally, I'm still dealing with periods during year when all 3 phones in my house from Orange are receiving calls from same spam number - two mobile contracts and one landline. I explicitly demanded which was check-marked on my subscriber's account that I do not wish receiving spam calls even if that means my bill is cut by 5 PLN and I'm missing chance to win something (sic!); so it seems even service provider doesn't bother with legislation here.
> they note this down, and call again the next month.
It's probably due to rotation of people - one shift comes in and then next one and nobody cares what called person has to say. It's still a potential "client" for them and the mindset here is "maybe after n-th time they'll gave up and purchase our stuff", I believe
This seems to be somewhat similar in Germany. I got lots of calls from companies trying to sell me SEO optimization or whatever when I was in charge (and listed on the website) for the online business of my former employee. But I received little to none mails from those companies because cold-mailing is prohibited by German laws against unfair competition. Seems to be somewhat broken that you may telephone-spam somebody but are not allowed to do so via mail.
BTW, if I receive spam SMSes on my German number that are sent from the UK, can I report those to the Bundesnetzagentur, or do I need to find the relevant UK authority?
According to their website they only take complaints about commercial spam. The spam I'm referring to comes from a non-EU political party, which probably makes things more complicated.
Honestly the only times I use the phone portion of my cell phone is to validate my WhatsApp account, 2FA for various websites that don't support FIDO, and talking to recruiters, and texting people who I don't have a better method of contacting them (fb, WhatsApp, email etc)
I could probably dump my phone number except for WhatsApp. That's basically replaced my phone for all friends and family. I haven't turned on my ringer in months.
Ah man, I only normally answer at the point someone starts talking to the answerphone and I recognise their voice - people we know are aware of that and so can say who they are and we'll pick up.
I had call after call after call from this one number, over about 3 weeks. Eventually, after I was complaining about it to my wife the phone went and it was the same number so I picked up ... it was a domain registrar asking "are you happy, do you need any help", that was it, just a lousy marketing call (probably because I basketed a domain with them and then bought it elsewhere).
I only answer the phone if the call is from someone on my contact list.
My phone is in Do Not Disturb mode 100% of the time, with only alarms and priority calls whitelisted, so I know that if a call comes through, it's probably important.
Everyone else can send a message or record a voicemail. I'll call or write back when I feel like it. I have also taken the step of disabling all notifications except for direct messages to me. Those get to pop an icon in the notification bar, but no sound nor vibration alerts. I'll see the message whenever I decide to check my phone.
I'm setup pretty much the same way. I actually have a home phone (in addition to a cell phone). We used to get robocalls all the time, so it was really just something that would ring at annoying times till the answering machine picked up. We just replaced it with a new phone that has call blocking. Callers in your caller id are allowed to ring through. Everyone else has to say a name and press a button before they can ring through. While I'm sure some robocallers can press buttons, none of ours do. We put family phone numbers and some of the medical/vet office numbers in. Our phone has been blissfully quiet since.
Over the past 6 months the number of robocalls to my mobile number has increased from 1 or 2 a week to at least 5+ a day. I’ve also just stopped answering numbers I don’t recognize.m, which isn’t always ideal because I miss legitimate calls now. I actually just send it immediately to voicemail. Most of the time my voicemail box is full because it’s filled with junk I don’t bother clearing out.
Ive contemplated changing my number. But I imagine that won’t actually help. Is this just the new reality? Are there any solutions?
I've moved to a new area code and kept my old number. Aside from known contacts, if I get a call from my phone's area code, I know it is not legit. If I get a call from my new area code, I know it has to be a local someone and I should answer it. Zero accepted robo calls in 6mo.
I've also done the "moved out of the area code of my number 15 years ago" [1], but someone's gotten smarter lately. They've hooked up to some sort of information source and I'm getting a lot more robo calls from my real area code lately. Since we have so many dozens of thousands of our best and brightest thinking day in and day out about how to violate our privacy, more dozens of thousands figuring out how to monetize that data, and so many dozens of our best and brightest thinking about how to secure that data, I can't even begin to guess what they've got a hold of or what it is, just that it's enough to start spamming me with faked calls that look a lot more real.
I've literally noticed this just in the last couple of weeks; at least for me, it's a relatively recent development. YMMV.
Slightly off topic (of the OP, not parent comment)
Are you referring to this? [0] I was googling because I was interested. Looking at this the data seems fishy. Under total respondents they have answers for the age group, but not under any of the democratic/democratic leaning responses. So it looks like they only interviewed republicans under 50 and both groups 50+. There's some more fishy patterns like that with repubs <$50k.
So it is hard to say if only young republicans answer their phones or the data set is (purposefully?) biased.
No. Read the methodology statement carefully. They have 1000 respondents to the entire poll. When they refer to the data by a stratified group, they only present it if the number of people in that group is 125 or greater.
For the poll questions that specifically say. “For voters registered as Democrats or democrat-leaning independents”, the response Pool is cut down to something like 450 (the exact number is listed in the description). If they then divide that into four age groups, then it would actually be reasonable for NONE of them to exceed 125 respondents.
If you look at other breakdowns in the survey, it is clear that all of the age groups and demographics are covered.
Also note that polls results are almost always corrected after the fact for sampling error - so if they get a low response rate from 20-30 year olds, then they weight those responses more heavily so that they represent the expected proportion of the overall population.
Robocalls seem to be mostly an American problem. I live in Netherland, and I don't think I've ever had a robocall. Marketers, salespeople, pollsters, salespeople pretending to be pollsters, yes, all of those, but all of them real people at least.
Most of the spam calls are from energy companies selling energy to small businesses, because I'm registered as a business. Maybe I should get a separate phone number that goes straight to voicemail for my CoC registration.
But other than that, our do-not-call regulation seems to be working quite well. Maybe the US should copy it.
Do you have any guesses as to why you've been chosen? I can't remember the last robocall I got.
I'm in my late 30s, have a cell phone only, which is on the do not call registry. The only times I get harassed are when I update my resume on whatever job site. Then for a few weeks/months I get what I consider too many calls from recruiters.
I wonder if we have different purchase histories or something that has resulted in this very different outcome.
I also have a similar experience to the OP. However, I do not get 10 calls a day. It's generally 1-3 during most weekdays but not all.
I use to not travel much, and any traveling I did was pretty basic flight + hotel. No fancy vacations or anything. A bit over a year ago I booked a trip to a resort in Cancun through a travel agency in Florida. None stop spam since. I noticed a massive increase the amount of email spam I got and started to received a large number of phone calls.
I can't say for certain that was the cause as it seems spam phone calls have been heavily increasing over the last few years, but it's the only thing I can point to as an out of the ordinary change.
This isn’t the case anymore. There is currently no real enforcement mechanism in place for the registry, so even a number on the registry will get many robo calls a day now.
I don't understand why young (I'm making an assumption here) people don't like making or receiving voice calls. I'd far rather talk to someone than text them. Texting requires far more effort and takes far more time.
In my physical mailbox, 99% of parcels are something I want that I ordered, and 97% of letters are spam or bills. Naturally my feelings and enthusiasm on finding them reflect this, even before opening them: my response to the medium is due to the message correlated with it.
It seems plausible to me that some people would have learned similar correlations between chat notifications vs ringtones.
First things first: Everyone hears your end of the conversation with a voice call. I absolutely hate that: My family would pick up pieces (by accident or not) and when my ex's mental illness was worse, he would listen. Period.
But there are also other things: I can flush the toilet. I don't have to do as many "formalities" and I don't have to stop everything I'm doing to have a conversation with someone.
I figure communication goes on a sliding scale of intrusiveness. Video is the most intrusive (I don't know why old sci-fi wanted this!)... and text the least.
I find discussions over text long winded and can often be discussed more thoroughly with a simple phone call. I'm with you on video chats, although while I was living overseas for a number of years my mother insisted on it, which was fine. But I don't take phone calls when I'm surrounded by people, I'll head outside or into the corridor.
I personally just prefer phone calls for any proper conversations, the odd "hello, how are you doing?" type messages are fine with text but if I actually want to talk to someone, phone calls every time.
It's less the speed of typing but the continual back and forth of texting and the delay between messages. You send a message, you get a reply - sometimes later on in the day and you don't want to be that guy by hassling the recipient of your text messages by keep nudging them.
Example, today on the train I texted a mate to see if he was about as we'd previously discussed meeting up today. I was going to get off the train at a particular stop if I was going to see him but otherwise would have carried on. I texted him and didn't get a reply until just before I was going to get off the train, which was about 40 minutes later. If I'd just given him a phone call, I'd have known immediately. It was all fine in the end but if I hadn't received his text before the first stop, I'd have continued on my way assuming he was busy. But because now the default method of communication is text messaging, I feel I can't make a phone call any more.
I'd rather talk to people, too. I'm not even young, I'm 43 years old and I grew up running into the kitchen to answer every phone call before anyone else could grab it. These days the phone is so useless that I only get to talk to people face to face. Part of the problem is the spam and part of the problem is the voice quality. If you are my age you remember when phone calls actually sounded OK and phone companies competed on call quality ("you can hear a pin drop"). Now every phone call is a battle between your ears, some horrible vocoder, and 99% packet loss. Not enjoyable at all.
A voice call means they need my attention RIGHT NOW. (This is fine if it's during declared "office hours").
If the call is from someone I know, then it's likely they could have also messaged me or emailed me.
But if the call is from someone I don't know, it's either a scam or they're trying to sell me something. Some situation where they are more prepared than I am.
But even then, text can be unambiguous in detail where I might fail to hear something in the call. And with text, I can generally take my time to reply when I choose to, can take the time to consider what to reply, etc.
For better or worse, text omits a lot of "body language" aspects too.
> I can’t imagine why anyone ever answers the phone. I get at least ten robocalls every weekday.
I answer the phone all the time and it's always someone I know. I do not have a caller id display.
Here's how I managed that.
Only 4 people know my real phone number and are under orders not to add it to any digital address book.
My phone number is registered to an alias. I pay for my phone using cash.
My area code is in a city I've never lived in and have no connection to.
I add my number to the do not call list.
For generic phone number requests, such as stores and shipper that demand it, it's always 555-1212.
Of course this method won't work well for people who need to give their phone number out to people they don't know. But then again if that result is simply not to answer the phone ever, why would that be better. And for those who really only ever want to hear from a half dozen or fewer trusted friends and family, this is a solution that works.
I get maybe 3 or 4 spam calls a year. I've had the same number for over 20 years and I've given it to thousands of people. Like you, I only give it to real actual people who I want to call me, though many of them were strangers. I never placed any restrictions on how they store it or made any other effort to keep it private. Since 2009 or so I have had a google voice number in a different area code that I use to fill out forms and give to strangers, but since blocking calls to it from that same area code I let it ring through to my main number now and it also gets virtually no spam (it's possible the 3 or 4 I get are actually from this number).
My main actual trick has been to be discerning in the things I sign up for and never filling in information that's not required.
The most egregious sources of spam I've found are the government. Get your name anywhere near a property deed and you'll get a barrage of spam from companies that think you're new to the neighborhood.
Think you might want to save on paper and give out your email address when you register to vote? Dear god. San Francisco doesn't give voters the ability to only receive correspondence from the Department of Elections. The spam is insane. Obviously you get all sorts crackpots running for office that'll spam you endlessly. For a while I was even getting email about pet clothing from some guy. Turns out he ran a failed mayoral campaign and then turned around and used the voter rolls to promote his business (because clearly I want a tutu for my non-existent dog).
And, sure, you can remove your email address from the voter rolls but not your physical address (so that spam will continue unmitigated). San Francisco is an extra level of special here as it doesn't even bother with HTTPS for their Department of Elections stuff.
For the last one - meteoric rise of services like JustEat meant that I haven't had to ring anyone to order food for at least 8 years now. If your restaurant is not on justeat/Uber eats/you have your own website that allows ordering, then I'm not interested in ordering from you. Also, if you order through a phone how do you pay? In cash??
Even when you order from JustEat, don’t you give the delivery driver a number to call when they arrive (or get lost)? They almost never come directly to my apartment or office; I usually get a call saying they’re downstairs or outside (if parking is bad) instead.
In...olden times when people ordered by talking to other people, you’d often pay cash. Some places would take credit cards, usually by reading the number out loud. One fancy place let you type the numbers in with the touch pad.
It is if you live a mostly cash-less life. I don’t typically carry any cash on me and don’t pay in cash, which means I often also don’t have any cash at home.
Card payments, contactless payments, Apple Pay, metro/travel cards and banks/financial institutions with fancy mobile apps have meant that I rarely if ever need cash.
You can read the card number to them on the phone. This is what we did back in the day back when credit cards were common but online ordering was much of a thing yet.
I am not the person you are replying to, but I would like to point out that my job never calls me (and if they expected me to be reachable they would give me a work phone), I keep in touch with my friends via my computer, and I order pizza online. Medical appointments are still done over the phone, though, but not always.
I wouldn't go as far as to have no phone number whatsoever, but living without one doesn't seem entirely crazy to me.
I lived without a phone number for about 9 months a few years ago. My phone was basically a WiFi device. I really enjoyed this time and am considering doing it again. I only stopped because my brother got annoyed and bought me a new SIM, but nowadays he doesn’t call me much and uses internet for voice. Even my mother uses WhatsApp for voice.
Having a WiFi-only device (as opposed to a data-only one) did mean I had to plan things a bit, just like I had to do before mobile phones became such a popular thing. It wasn’t a big deal at all.
My current job doesn’t call me very often, but recruiters and HR folks love the phone. Likewise, small businesses are way easier to deal with on the phone vs. online (larger ones are a toss-up).
I guess I’m convinced that it could be done, but I’m less convinced that it makes sense, and baffled as to why you’d pay for a phone and then go to such lengths to avoid using it.
In the US, as long as you don't pay extra not to be listed, your phone number will be available to the world. I get 5-10 robocalls a day on a number I had never given out to anyone.
I feel like if FCC/Telephone providers don't fix this soon, traditional cell phones will become unreliable and we will need to adopt a new system or just use existing framework (facetime, whatsapp, etc.).
If every cell phone has LTE and internet connection, why the fuck do we need traditional cell phone number? I never use it except for calling my pharmacy, customer support or restaurants/shops. All conversations with friends and family happen over messages and Facetime Audio or Whatsapp.
While I don't wish to suggest we move to a proprietary system such as Facetime, I think there is a real need for email equivalent of a VOIP solution where there is automatic spam filtering just like emails.
Also, why can't cell phone providers use same spam filtering techniques used in email filters? I don't know the details of spoofing but I feel like telephone providers are scum of the earth and they have some kind of a reverse incentive to continue allowing spam calls.
On spam filtering: the public telephone network transmits almost zero data on a call - the only header is the originating number, which can be un-traceably spoofed at the originator. There is no embedded message data (that would be the call itself). So there’s literally no valid data to filter spam on, unless the spam caller is chivalrous enough to use their legit caller ID.
I would also bet that there are regulations that require phone providers to complete all calls that are presented to them.
My provider, T Mobile, does overwrite the caller ID with “Scam Likely” for what they believe to be telemarketing calls, which is probably the best they can do until we implement a standard that authenticates the origination ID of calls.
There’s at least one piece of data on every call that the network operator has—-the identity of the prior network hop.
In the early days of fighting email spam, that was enough. Every network operator was responsible for receiving spam complaints and responding appropriately. Network providers that couldn’t or wouldn’t prevent spammers from using their networks were blacklisted and other networks would refuse to route mail originating from them.
It wasn’t perfect, but it was far better than nothing.
From my best interpretation of your comment you seem to think VoIP is far more "carrier peer to carrier peer" than it is in practice. As a value added telecom provider I have a few upstream carriers but it's not as if I receive calls from every carrier. Just like the Internet, my upstream carriers are my access points to the PSTN, so all of my SIP invites come from either my customers or my know upstream carriers. Those carriers are effectively my ISPs of the PSTN. I chose them and I pay them for service.
Distrusting one of them and the calls that come from them is something of a non-sequitur since you chose them and intentionally became one of their customers and pay them to receive those calls.
TL;DR This isn't like email or IP traffic where you're interacting with other IPs in a purely untrusted network model. Merely analyzing the previous hop doesn't tell us anything valuable.
That’s the peril of being a leaf node. The same thing was true in the early days of email. An end user, or in your case something close to it, couldn’t blacklist his upstream—-as you say that would be ridiculous. But your upstream (or possibly their upstream) does have true peers that they could blacklist for bad behavior. It might mean there customers couldn’t receive calls from entire countries, but that’s a trade-off I, and I assume plenty of other, would be happy to make and even pay extra for.
This assumes that is that there isn’t some kind of international treaty that forbids doing so. The existence of such has been claimed from time to time in similar discussions but I have yet to see an actual citation.
> the only header is the originating number, which can be un-traceably spoofed at the originator
That's wrong, phone signalling systems always specify the originating number and it cannot be spoofed. The key thing is that only 911 responders and similar lines have the CLIRIGN flag set on their lines which means that the spoofed number transmitted via CLIP is ignored and the real one used instead.
In addition victims of e.g. threat calls can have the MCID flag set on their line which makes the provider systems log all call information for later retrieval by police.
My phones so bad that I have the do not disturb night mode feature enabled full time only allowing people in my contacts to ring.
It really annoys me that there isn’t a way of filtering calls based on country. 99% of my junk calls come from Australian numbers, so if I could just block Australia...
70% of the spam calls I get could be stopped simply by blocking the exact same exchange that my number is in.
Do spam callers really think I'm expecting a call from the same area code, same exchange as my own number? Do most people have friends that have phone numbers with the same first six digits in common with their own?
I feel like this trick can't possibly work on anyone who has already seen it twice, and just based on the number of times I've seen it, I have to assume everyone has seen it at least five times by now, either that or they aren't even paying attention to caller ID at all.
The way a friend described it to me, if you have a child, and that child is out of your sight, you sort of have to be open to answering phone calls from your local area.
One thing I like with Google Voice is that it has a phone screen where you have to say your name and then it plays it back to me before I decide to accept the call.
"Do spam callers really think I'm expecting a call from the same area code, same exchange as my own number? Do most people have friends that have phone numbers with the same first six digits in common with their own?"
All of the weirdness and strange patterns and methods you see in practice by these actors make perfect sense when you realize their targets are seniors.
In fact, even the ability to keep someone on the phone past the first 2 seconds of recorded intro greeting makes sense if that's the only interaction with a human you get all day/week.
The lives of inactive, retired seniors in the United States - especially in small or rural towns - is tremendously bleak.
And yes, they've spent their entire life with technology wherein everyone they talked to had the same NPA+PREFIX.
It might be related to the same reason that Nigerian scam emails keep following the same easy-to-spot pattern. It is to the scammers advantage that savvy marks immediately recognize the scam and don't participate. It saves the scammers time and money if they don't chase leads that won't pay off. Better to be immediately recognized as a scam by 98% of everyone, and focus your attention in the 2% who are most likely to pay off anyway!
I'd buy that argument. It jibes well with the research we did to come to this conclusion, when we started buying numbers in local area codes at the call center I used to work for... (excerpt from where I posted it elsewhere)
> In hindsight it may have helped us work contact lists faster but it did nothing for our survey completion rates. People who were not likely to answer an out-of-state call were apparently also not likely to answer a survey, even once you got them on the phone. To us, that trade-off was still worth it, because we were usually contracted to try each contact on our list either 3-5 times or until we reached a person who (completed or) declined the survey or asked you to stop calling.
> If you didn't want the calls, then we straight did not want you to continue getting them.
Don't chase leads that won't pay off. Do as little extra work as you can, to increase the likelihood of learning when a lead is known bad, so you can stop wasting effort there.
> Do spam callers really think I'm expecting a call from the same area code, same exchange as my own number? Do most people have friends that have phone numbers with the same first six digits in common with their own?
In the US, outside of the dense metro areas, this is a much more common than you think. For non-metro areas, it is quite common for everyone in the area (business and personal) with which you might receive a call has a number in the same exchange as your number.
But it is doubtful the spammers are considering that fact. It is much more likely they simply did A/B testing and saw a measurable increase in answer rate if the transmitted caller ID matched area code and exchange of the number they were dialing. And so they simply started using this trick, because their testing showed it worked.
You're right. On two counts. My folks live in a small town in Western NY and everyone has the same exchange. I have to believe that's a minority of people by the numbers, but I could easily be wrong, and if rural towns are specifically your target market, it wouldn't matter if I was right...
And I worked for a call center company once, which employed a similar technique. Not down to the exchange, but by area code. We ran the numbers and found that we were much more likely to reach a person if we called through a number that belonged to their own area code, people don't pick up for out-of-state callers.
We were calling for customer satisfaction surveys, on behalf of companies they had done some business with – and almost always with a presence in their local area. So it wasn't technically a deception, unless you think that area codes should reliably represent the caller's location, in which case you'd be fighting a losing battle to be sure...
In hindsight it may have helped us work contact lists faster but it did nothing for our survey completion rates. People who were not likely to answer an out-of-state call were apparently also not likely to answer a survey, even once you got them on the phone. To us, that trade-off was still worth it, because we were usually contracted to try each contact on our list either 3-5 times or until we reached a person who (completed or) declined the survey or asked you to stop calling.
If you didn't want the calls, then we straight did not want you to continue getting them. Another rule we had was, it should not be possible for the person's phone to ring, and when they pick up it's just dead air. That means no predictive autodialers. (And of course that was the first rule to change when the company was sold, barf.)
We also ran the numbers on each area code and did a little cost-benefit deciding whether to buy those numbers or not, based on how many times we'd use them. If we didn't own a local number, we didn't use one. And we made sure that if anyone called back, the first thing they reached was a robot with a single digit to push to be added to Do Not Call list.
Turns out if you make it easy for people to get the calls to stop, you get a lot less angry people calling the reception and less angry voicemail messages, which makes for better call center employee experiences and better outcomes all-around. (I guess another strategy is to just spoof Caller ID with a number you don't own, so they can never call you back, and run the predictive rates so high that you never actually talk to an employee either. Totally unethical and it has to stop!)
The number of calls I receive which immediately hang up seconds after I pick up is absolutely ridiculous. I just imagine this call center full of people with auto-dialers going on full-speed across the room, nobody is wearing a headset and nobody is at their desk, but everyone is just sitting around a cash bonfire telling stories and laughing...
As someone who has worked in telecom for a long time, I assure you most of us carriers / service providers (Except maybe Big Red and Big Blue) desperately want to implement signed SIP invites and kill robocall for our customers. We also want to universally deploy G.722 HD Voice without unnecessary transcoding. The telephone industry and the Big Color Telecoms (Red /Verizon, Blue / AT&T, Green / CenturyLink, Yellow / Sprint, Pink / T-Mobile) moves at a snail's pace. The security model of domestic VoIP right now is largely IP whitelisting or private IP circuits, no encryption allowed unless it's an entirely on-net call where you deal with that yourself and send it to the telecom unencrypted. We'd like to fix that too, but again, big telecoms aren't interested as best we can tell (they don't communicate their strategy reliably so we have to infer from their actions). Encryption of in flight calls, even with wiretap laws and legalized domestic surveillance, is important in my opinion.
Of all of them, I think T-mobile is the most willing to actually improve the industry for everyone's benefit.
When we receive a SIP invite (incoming call) from one of our upstream carriers, the amount of metadata information they're able to provide us is often very limited (largely due to interop issues in my opinion). If you think about IP spoofing, BGP, and the state of egress filtering on the internet, it's a very similar situation.
Since this is related to my work, obviously all of the above is just my personal opinion.
> we will need to adopt a new system or just use existing framework (facetime, whatsapp, etc.).
I already use white lists -- I simply don't answer the phone if the person isn't in my contacts list and I'm not expecting a call from an unknown number. I assume this is pretty common practice.
> If every cell phone has LTE and internet connection, why the fuck do we need traditional cell phone number?
I almost never have LTE or even mobile data of any kind when I'm outside of cities (for a liberal definition of city).
> Also, why can't cell phone providers use same spam filtering techniques used in email filters?
Because spam filters rely on contents in addition to meta-data. You can't pick up the phone and listen to the contents for a few minutes.
> I almost never have LTE or even mobile data of any kind when I'm outside of cities (for a liberal definition of city)
I'm curious what countries
/places these are. My operator doesn't even activate 3G on modern phones, I literally have nothing aside from LTE/VoLTE. Since LTE got deployed on the low frequencies reclaimed from analog TV, the reception is generally BETTER than 3G etc.
Also when there are natural disasters, the voice infrastructure is the first to collapse, but data in chat apps still makes it through
The United States. Not even the western or mountain states! One of the places I regularly go that doesn't have data coverage but does have voice coverage is in a national (or maybe state there?) forest in New York state.
> Also when there are natural disasters, the voice infrastructure is the first to collapse, but data in chat apps still makes it through
I don't have any experience with this, so I'll take your word for it.
> I think there is a real need for email equivalent of a VOIP solution where there is automatic spam filtering just like emails.
https://truecaller.com uses a crowd-sourced model to help you identify PSTN callers and spammers not in your contacts.
Besides, I think WhatsApp had the right idea around personal communication at least when Jan and Brian called the shots.
> If every cell phone has LTE and internet connection, why the fuck do we need traditional cell phone number?
I think with SecureElement now common in Android-based devices, eSIMs would be ubiquitous and may be SpaceX's Starlink would mean the end of traditional PSTN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19680412
Unfortunately, yes, but you don't necessarily have to use the TrueCaller app on Android/iOS, the website works just fine. Besides, TrueCaller and WhatsApp won't be the only apps to steal your phone book, and with 100M and 2B installs respectively, the jury is already out on their utility.
AT&T and T-mobile (maybe others?) have free spam filtering. It's not perfect but it does help.
As for your other question - there are still lots and lots and lots of regular phones in the world that call me and that I need to call. As you mentioned in your example - every business, school, government, etc.
Someone decided to spoof my cell phone number to spam call people. I don’t know how they filter spam calls from legit numbers without a new approach akin to DKIM/SPF where the number sets what carrier a call can originate from.
> I feel like if FCC/Telephone providers don't fix this soon, traditional cell phones will become unreliable and we will need to adopt a new system or just use existing framework (facetime, whatsapp, etc.).
They do not intend to fix anything.
This captured FCC would rather everyone use the internet to communicate, since they deregulated that, than telephones which they cannot deregulate. The game is, make money as fast as possible in deregulated industries until people complain of lousy service and the government steps in.
Bonus points if the captured FCC can convince you that they care about these robocalls.
EDIT: Please explain downvotes. You feel the current FCC are saints and would never do such a thing?
TMobile used to offer (maybe they still do?) a data-only plan that was/is meant for remote sensing applications (alarms, etc). It wasn't something that was listed on their site (ok - it was there, but you had to really, really dig for it to find out about it).
IIRC, it was also free, but limited to 200 MB a month.
You basically got a SIM card you could stuff into your embedded sensor app and away you go.
That might be a large enough data cap for plain-text messaging, but not much else.
You'll always have a phone number, but on an SMS- or Data-only plan it will never ring (MVNOs in my country offer these types of plans at a discount because reserving a voice phone number here is subject to ID verification and higher fees)
Get a Wifi box, that itself contains a SIM card. Then you connect to it from your phone using Wifi. You just need to be careful because your phone will now take the liberty to update apps and use your data more liberally.
German authorities call this 'Ping Call', and ordered telecommunications providers to make pricing transparent via voice announcements prior to calling, due to ~14.000 complaints in 1/2019 [0]
I wonder if the solution is remarkably simple: Make phone calls expensive again.
Get rid of unlimited/free/super-cheap rates and make all callers pay by the minute again. Especially inbound international calls.
Let people who want free communication use FaceTime and SMS and Email and whatnot. But make phone calls expensive enough that you know if someone is paying to call you it must be important.
I got my first document scanner in 1997. Because of that I still have all of my phone bills going back to that year. I just looked up my April 1997 Cincinnati Bell bill. A five minute call from Cincinnati to Charleston, West Virginia cost $1.45 ($2.31 in 2019 money).
If we can raise the cost of customer acquisition there will be far fewer scammers.
Incidentally, my total bill for that month was $104.34 -- almost the same as what I spend for cell service today. Except that now I'm paying for unlimited texts and minutes that I never use. The only advantage my phone has today is its mobility, which feels more like a burden than a benefit.
I believe this is one reason why spam calls are less of a problem in Europe - in Europe the caller pays the higher rate to call mobile phones (vs the north America system where the cell phone user pays for incoming "airtime"). Just looking at skypeout rates and an example, UK landlines cost 2 cents/min vs 10 cents for mobiles
Yes, receiving calls (and text messages) is free. (unless you are roaming and then you pay the international sector of the call)
As far as I know this is true not just in Europe but everywhere outside of North America. It's certainly been true in the Asian countries I've been to (I get prepaid SIM cards everywhere I visit). It comes down to the numbering plans - in the NANP (north american numbering plan), landline and mobile phone numbers are mixed together and you can't distinguish them without a database. In other countries, mobile phones have their own "mobile phones" area code which is non-geographic and applies to all mobile phones. This means that callers beforehand know if they're calling a mobile phone or a landline.
> In other countries, mobile phones have their own "mobile phones" area code which is non-geographic and applies to all mobile phones.
Here in Brazil it's slightly different. The area codes are the same for fixed and cell phones, but if the first digit of the local part of the phone number is in the 7-9 range, it's a cell phone (if it's in the 2-6 range, it's a fixed phone; 1 is reserved for special services like emergency, 0 is the interurban/international/toll-free/etc prefix). So a number like +55-11-9xxxx-xxxx is a cell phone in the São Paulo region (area code 11), while a number like +55-11-2xxx-xxxx is a fixed phone in the same region.
It's interesting that they've managed to merge the numbering systems in that way! Who pays the extra cost for a call to a mobile phone, the caller or the receiver? I've yet to visit any South/Central American countries, they seem to have inherited a lot of North American phone operator customs (like 850/1900 radio bands and CDMA).
In the European country I used to live in, they even had different mobile area codes per-operator, so you knew which mobile operator the person you were calling to was on. They would have deals where calling someone on the same operator was free. This got complicated when number portability was added (and the number of mobile phones increased)
> Who pays the extra cost for a call to a mobile phone, the caller or the receiver?
The caller. You don't pay to receive normal calls unless you're roaming (since the caller can't know you're roaming, it wouldn't be fair to make the caller pay the roaming charges).
> they seem to have inherited a lot of North American phone operator customs (like 850/1900 radio bands and CDMA).
The radio bands make sense, since the whole American continent is a single ITU region. As for CDMA, here on Brazil initially it was only Vivo on CDMA and the rest on GSM, but then Vivo also switched to GSM some time ago.
> They would have deals where calling someone on the same operator was free.
We also have these deals here. And also here, number portability muddled things: while before for instance 95xx to 99xx was Vivo and 90xx to 94xx was Claro, nowadays you can't be sure (and that's before they added an extra "9" digit before all cell phone numbers, making them 9 digits instead of 8).
At least in the countries I'm familiar with it's free, unless you're in a different country and have to pay roaming charges. (Gotta be careful with "in Europe" claims)
In the UK it's free to receive calls. When travelling abroad you have to consider people leaving you a voicemail costing you if it rings you phone first, then they go to your voicemail.
The downside is you can't really get free services that forward to your mobile.
I'm disinclined to damage communication to stop bad actors. And I believe that this type of solution completely ignores the largely disproportionate economic impacts that reverting to those prices would have on different socioeconomic tiers. Human communication is a good thing and largely responsible for the positive aspects of where we are today. Respectfully, diminishing it to provide relief from an inconvenience seems short sighted.
It's not about paying by the minute. It's paying by the annoyance: there should be a fixed fee for dialing someone that doubles if they hang up in some brief number of seconds. It's not about the total time I spend talking to robocallers, it's the interruption they represent and the effort to screen them out.
It's been a problem for me in Sweden the last couple of years. I've had the same company phone number since 2011 but the last 2 years I've seen strange calls from international numbers.
They seem spoofed because you can see them increment the numbers and try again. Also they come from various countries both in and out of europe.
They always ring 2-3 times then hang up.
I've blocked dozens of them by now, they just come up with new numbers.
I don't understand what the point is because nothing happens if you call back so there's nothing to keep you on the line.
Also nothing happens if you respond.
I understand that these are all things I shouldn't do but a) at one point the numbers resembled those of RedHat in the UK and b) I was curious.
The calling-from numbers usually don't terminate, ie they're "number not recognised" or similar errors. This seems like something the phone company could fix if they cared to, or indeed the industry watchdogs could fix "do not forward a call when the sending number doesn't terminate". Problem is that marketing companies will do things like have ex-country calls with in-country "sender" numbers so they can use foreign call centres and appear to be calling from the UK.
Lobbying groups working on behalf of the telcos and related business interests that oppose any measures to deal with this, and most other, issues that someone is making money as a result of.
Here in France I receive these sort of calls from Tunisia quite regularly. Plus some guys declared as SPAM by the truecaller App I'm using precisely for this purpose (usually telemarketers trying to sell pay TV, insurances or some other crap I don't want). I'd say it makes for about 30% of all the incoming calls.
Therefore I don't reply to unknown or hidden numbers.
My (French) phone number is semi-publicly visible, and I've had it for a few years now. I get maybe 1 unsolicited call a month. What am I doing wrong? :P
Might also be because the Netherlands is a small and relatively expensive country in Europe where international rates are quite high. So, it's not compelling enough for them to open an call center in NL, and placing it outside of NL would increase their phone costs.
Also, not many people on the planet speak dutch, so the addressable market is quite small.
Living in Munich, got the first 'Hello, I am from microsoft, please grant me access to your computer'-calls three weeks ago. Blocked the number, scammer tried to call from this number 10 times again while blocked, then tried it on a new phone number. I've blocked the new one after the second call. Since then, my phone is silent again.
It's all about the money. Laws are not put in place to stop this because the companies that make the money lobby to not have them or even worse, tear down the ones that are there.
I started with an experiment about a year back and now I've practically stopped answering phone calls. My phone responses are now async. Just like an email, I look up the missed calls list once a while and call back if I know someone or was expecting a call from a particular number.
The phone is kept silent at all times and is on DND mode from the first minute of the day to the last.
The only call that passes through are the ones in the favorites, which will never exceed 10. Even they won't ring but vibrate. (My wife knows how to make my phone ring via Find my Phone.)
Scammers are getting more and more sophisticated now a days. It seems like most of these scam calls are a result of the ability to spoof phone numbers.
Spoofing phone numbers does have legitimate purposes (for example a phone number from a customer service company is able to use their company phone number as the caller ID) but these scammers seem to abuse this. It's quite similar to how SMTP for emails allows the "From" field to be set to something other than your actual email. Email scammers abuse this same thing too but the difference is that in SMTP emails, you can still tap the detailed headers of the email and see what the actual "from" email is. But for phone numbers, this isn't the case.
I think, the best way to solve this phone scam issue would be by modifying the phone protocol (I am not sure of the details) to allow users to be able to see the "Real" underlying phone number.
(which seems a US focused initiative, which I guess makes sense as the problem seems much worse there than in other countries... but I wonder if that means that you guys will be getting lots of robocalls from unknown foreign numbers in the future ;)
If a majority of robocalls are originating on IP endpoints as the entry to the PSTN - this would appear to solve the issue at hand, SHAKEN/STIR, is an IP only protocol, and has not been extended to TDM originating traffic though (nor could it be really)
I am located in Canada and I received about 15 - 20 spam phone calls each week. Most of them would even spoof the phone number to my area code (sometimes my own phone number lol). So I don't think it's a US only problem.
At the very least, for calls purporting to come from within the US, it seems that telephone companies should be able to verify the actual origin of the call and cut off spammers. But perhaps there is more to this than I understand that makes it infeasible.
That is largely correct, yes - the issue comes up where numbers are valid from more than one carrier, even though say, carrier A owns the numbers, its perfectly valid to place outbound calls for those numbers via carrier B - there is no records kept for that kind of thing currently however.
> I think, the best way to solve this phone scam issue would be by modifying the phone protocol (I am not sure of the details) to allow users to be able to see the "Real" underlying phone number.
In China, we call this type of scam "响一声". It was very common until phone screen softwares started marking this kind of calls[0] so people stopped calling them back.
Maybe use one of those call screen app (offline one is better) until phone companies figured out how to resolve this?
> allow users to be able to see the "Real" underlying phone number
There are many cases where people will find it unacceptable. You don't want someone to dial directly to someone's desk at a corporation rather than front desk. You don't want someone to call a doctor on their private phone (they call out via practice's number from the road). Etc.
You can't solve this issue by providing the two number. It's only solvable by making spam calls expensive for the callers, or punishing telcos for unverified spoofing.
> You don't want someone to dial directly to someone's desk at a corporation rather than front desk.
Couldn't this also be said about emails from companies? Similar to how they have the "donotreply" emails, can't they also have "donotdial" phone numbers?
The emails have links in them which direct you back to the website where you can continue the transaction/communication/whatever. You can't easily do this on the phone. You do want people to call you back. You as a company, not a specific phone on a specific desk.
Just like with email, that ship sailed a long time ago. In many cases, there is no "real" underlying phone number (example: VOIP... VOIP numbers may as well be disposable.)
I don't know, I could see the big mobile networks going off on their own and highlighting trusted callers from their own networks. And it would take only a few peering points between the big providers to cover the vast majority of cell users. I would actually switch networks for this (presumably one would do it first).
It's not even trusted callers, its blocking CID spoofing for numbers in their own owned pools, that are originating calls from elsewhere - this should be blocked, as I can think of very few cases where a cellular provider would find this valid.
This may be one of those things that is easier said than done. Number portability may make that more complicated than it seems. Any telco experts around?
Actually E-mail has things such as DMARC, DKIM and SPF that tremendously cut down scam looking real from certain domains. Another topic is just direct scam from new domain names but that's not what OP and you're talking about.
Why do we allow pay-per-minute phone services to even exist? There's no point to them in this day and age. If someone wants one of those services, there are plenty of ways to make it pay-per-minute without the phone company acting as a broker. Just end support for it, immediately.
One pattern I noticed but haven’t tried to circumvent yet is that I noticed robocalls identify on the caller ID as having the same area code as my normal phone number and my Google Voice number.
If we were to acquire a phone number from say, some small town somewhere you have no business with, then could we block all caller ID with that area code and avoid all such robocalls?
> identify on the caller ID as having the same area code as my normal phone number and my Google Voice number.
Most of my spam calls copy my area code and the first 3 digits of my phone number. In fact, I installed an android app called Calls Blacklist solely to make any call that began with the same 6 digits as me to not even ring - and now I get about 1 spam call per month.
Ooh, I need to look into that. I acquired my mobile number about 15 years ago in a town 20 minutes away where I know practically no one. I get plenty of calls that have the first 6 digits pattern and it is virtually certain that those calls will not be from someone I know. It would be great to have them never even ring.
I sort of unintentionally did this by buying my first cell phone while briefly living in a small city I no longer have any business with. It was effective for a long time but somehow in the past few months I have started getting robocalls using the area code of the actual city I currently live in.
I retain an out of state number that was used on resumes in the past. It gets slammed with frequent robocalls from the same area code. I have no contacts there so I can easily ignore them. My in-state numbers have been kept more secure and don't get any unwanted calls.
Similarly, I don't understand why people answer the front door when they can hear or see (through peephole or Ring) that it's a stranger. I don't need your magazines, your house-painting services, your church, or whatever else. If you're lost and looking for your friend's house you're supposed to be at, sorry I'm not gonna be able to help you anyway.
Sometimes a neighbor you haven't met is the one ringing the doorbell.
I recently had to leave my car parked in front of a stranger's house, so I rang the doorbell to let them know, but they didn't answer even though they were clearly home. Capitalism might be great and all, but door-to-door marketing and phone spamming have killed reasonable methods of communication.
I refuse to let these things die, so I still open the door if I don't know the person (I have a hotel-like door latch now to help prevent someone from kicking in the door or shooting an arrow at me). You just have to learn to be aggressive and say "I'm not interested" if it's a salesman or Jehovah's Witness.
I've given them the "I'm not interested" line. They always still try to make their sale despite me repeating it. The worst ones are the guys going around trying to sell steaks or to look at your power bill to "save you money". There are also people around here that will give you a sob story about why they need the money to mow your lawn. I've lived in a few neighborhoods around here and it's always the same. If I want you over you probably can text me, so I just ignore the door.
Might not be polite, but I don't say anything to salespeople and Jehovah's Witnesses, I just shut the door in their face. They disturbed me in my house so I don't think I owe them anything.
Sometimes you have to be very persistent, and that gets interpreted as aggression. For religious cults, diffuse charity collectors and similar it's usually sufficient to politely tell them they've come to the wrong person, and to leave the building and never come back. The electricity and internet salespeople otoh are extremely aggressive and I have often had to shout at them or physically chase them out of the building, and threaten with law enforcement. They shout back that they're trying to do their job but I don't see why that should make a difference. I'm in Germany, for reference.
Are you suggesting the attitude should be to give your time to door-to-door salesmen and every religious organization that wants to convert you? Everyone who comes to your door deserves your attention regardless of their intentions?
It's not really an "attitude" as much as it is a solution to a problem. The problem is door-to-door salesmen (whether they're selling phone service, vacuum cleaners, Girl Scout cookies, or religion).
There are ways and places to meet your neighbors that don't revolve around knocking on my door unsolicited. Once we've met, you're no longer a stranger and the "attitude" doesn't apply.
I have a Seattle area code and for the last year or so I've been getting daily calls from various 206 numbers that also match the first 3 digits of my number. I answered the first one and there is no one on the line. After that I block each new number but they keep calling. I guess it'll eventually end as there are only 9998 possible numbers.
In the last few years, my phone has steadily become more and more a pocket (textual) communicator and less a telephone. The amount of spam calls I get at the peak numbered about 20-30 per day and that is with my being on the do not call list. I spent some time wasting telemarketers time and that seemed, somewhat ironically to get me blacklisted from some of them and things trailed off.
From what I gathered, it seemed that none of the tele marketers were really all that interested in really landing a sale. Most of them are quick to hang up at the first sign of a troll, even if its minor. There are no hard sell tactics that Ive encountered. It makes me wonder who is spending the money to make these things profitable. Seems to me that its really just a vetting to see if the number is active so they can sell your contact info to another spamorg.
Note the ANI check. There are a couple extremely aggressive callers that I’ve had to blacklist their exchange to keep them from leaving weekly voicemail. The most recent is a company who calls monthly insisting I won a car, that this is their final attempt to reach me, that they aren’t a telemarketer, and that they are aware of the Do Not Call list.
For my cell, Google Voice seems to be working well enough for now. I do wish iOS had a voip app that was worth a damn, and that iOS would let you choose a custom app for outbound dialing. The Google Voice iOS app frankly stinks.
Funny thing is, I got hit by a flood of these calls on Saturday. Funny seeing it here right after it happened.
Unfortunately, I called one of them back before I realized it was an international number (Android's dialer, for some reason, seems to record everything as an unbroken string of numbers before updating them several minutes after the missed call, so I just thought it was a US number with area code 232. It wasn't until after the callback that it resolved to a Sierra Leone number, so I asked about it on Facebook, and I got a link to an article on the scam.
I immediately felt like a heel, and then I blocked the number, just in case I forget to never call it back. When my statement comes in at the end of the month, I think I'm going to try to contact my carrier and dispute the charge. Though I'm not holding my breath: I'm on Fi, and Google's customer support is notorious for being virtually nonexistent.
It occurred to me just last week that land line phones have caller ID as I was helping my parents port their land line into a VOIP service. How is it that cell phones, a nominally more advanced technology, lack this function which was retrofitted into the analog phone system? I'd love to read or hear more about how that came about.
Caller ID is an untrusted advisory best effort service. It has absolutely no integrity of any kind today. There's an American law against spoofing it in theory, but it's not very enforcable at the moment. Understand it's literally a string that you can set to any value, including complete nonsense, and calls will often work.
Heck, we constantly receive calls with invalid phone numbers. And it's not always on purpose, sometimes it's just crummy or small-time carriers in rural areas (no disrespect intended, this is just an honest statement from experience). If we ingress filtered all invalid numbers, it would almost certainly be devistating to our customers.
This is like with email. First we need an integrity mechanism, then we can start doing reputation and identifying bad actors.
Imagine if the web didn't have SSL certificates. That's what the legacy phone networks are foisting on the public. It's a garbage service and if the caller identity problem can't be solved, we should shut the whole thing down as it's actively harmful.
I have received dozens of phone calls a day that almost-but-not-quite match the 'One Ring' scam.
I get calls from international numbers, 'private numbers' and 'unknown numbers', (I'm not sure the difference between private and unkown, it's what android displays in caller id). The calls ring once and hang up. I've managed to answer it a few times but they usually disconnect before I can. When I answer I hear a few sentences in a language I don't recognize then they hang up.
The unknown and private numbers don't match the 'One Ring' scam because you cannot call back a private or unknown number.
This problem (and telemarketing in general) is incredibly easy to solve, especially if you are Google or Apple. In fact it's almost a disgrace that they don't.
Back in the day, did this with the apps for local.ch in Switzerland ( some fluffy details here: https://tel.local.ch/en/advertising-calls ) which something like 40-50% of the Swiss population have installed on their phones.
As a Yellow pages phonebook app we provided an "Incoming Call" lookup service against our search engine of Swiss business phone numbers, so we could see who you received calls from (data which we treated as strictly private).
These types of robocallers (and telemarketers in general) were really easy to spot in logs - you see a number that's been calling many different people but _wasn't_ in our official database of businesses (we had good coverage of all businesses in Switzerland), we'd flag it our users with "We don't know this number but we suspect telemarketing" leaving the user to decide whether they wanted to call back or not. The Google Places API or the Yelp API ( https://www.yelp.com/developers/documentation/v3/business_se... ) would probably suffice for the same purpose.
The only way to get round this is for robocallers to rotate the numbers they're using with a very high frequency so they don't "peak" in the logs but that can get expensive for them.
What's nice is this approach is also dynamic - you don't need an official database of blacklisted numbers. You just need a big enough sample of users with your app installed and you'll catch Robocallers as soon as they start peaking in any logs.
Apple and Google have way more insights into who's calling who than this (e.g. number of rings, email signatures, the users address books, which numbers have been blocked and a ton of analytics) which could be used to kill telemarketing for good. Given the solution is so simple, it really surprises me they don't.
This would be entirely predicated on callerid being trustworthy. But it isn’t. At all. Some scammers who have call lists based upon surreptitiously stolen contact lists now call people ‘from’ their own contacts.
True but I’d assume (at least right now) faked calledid makes up < 1% of telemarketing / scam calls.
Plus the type of robocalling described in the article where they ring once and hang up wouldn’t work if you fake the callerid - you’d just get them to call back someone from their contacts
I've never understood why we allow telephone operators provide unwanted premium rate call services to their clients without any opt out. These scams will just keep coming until it's no longer a matter of simply calling a number to spend a large per minute premium rate.
I'm guessing the average hacker news user is unlikely to get scammed by this one, but it's a common one and it works.
This happened to my gf few weeks back. Number came from some eastern European country. We thought it could be one of our friend who was traveling in eastern europe I'm that week. Luckily we saw her online on WhatsApp to make sure she wasn't the one calling. Quick Google search I did that time confirmed our hunch.
I take phone calls now—but I expect them. Either from people in my address book, or from customers I set up a call with in advance.
Recently, I had a payment service call me on behalf one of my customers—from my area code. I nearly told them to beat it. I was sure they were spammers.
Anon Phone calls are approaching completely spam bucket status. I doubt they will recover.
What baffles me about this is that getting people to dial these numbers has been a known scam for many years. The fix seems stupidly trivial: break up the North American Numbering Plan to move them out of the +1 zone. They just don’t belong there. Frankly, Canada should be moved out the +1 zone too.
Just changing the zone would do nothing for people who blindly dial back without even checking the number. What we need is a system to report the per-minute cost of an outgoing call, and being able to block any call above that limit (like, set the limit to $0.00/min and you can only call numbers included in your plan).
But of course carriers wouldn't want that, not only because it would make consumers painfully aware of how much their calls cost, but also because they are profiting from these scams.
> Frankly, Canada should be moved out the +1 zone too.
Why? Who does that benefit? It's pretty common for phone plans in both the US and Canada to treat the US/Canada as a single region for the purpose of long distance calls and texts.
Good point. The purpose of my comment you replied to above was that there should be either pricing normalization such that callers aren't surprised, OR split the +1 country code.
Its not just "kick everyone out of the US country code", it's protect consumers by principle of least surprise sorta. But again, this only protects against toll fraud and not all of the other "Appear to be in a nation you aren't" scams.
For the U.S., where most people rarely need to make international calls, an easy solution would be to use an option (which i am sure is provided by every operator), to just disable any international calls. Sounds like an easy fix.
As someone who has worked in the telecom space for nearly 20 years, I really think we need to remove other countries from country code +1. People in any country should have confidence when they dial a number that it isn't unexpectedly billing them for international calls. This applies to people in any of the +1 nations, not just the United States.
Otherwise, we need to set the rules and pricing conditional for being a part of +1 to mitigate this issue.
No disrespect to Canadians, but I wonder if most Canadians are aware of how much fraud operates out of Canada and takes advantage of the +1 area code plus the protections of being in another nation. This isn't just Carribean Island nations as people tend to stereotype.
(Please miss me with the whataboutism, I'm not throwing stones simply sharing information and experience.)
I tried to be clear that I believe the principle should apply to all callers. No on planet earth should second guess whether they're calling a different nation or not. That principle includes other +1 nations.
Sure, but as a Canadian, I'm not bothered by it. My phone and VoIP plans all include US calling/texting. I'd prefer to keep the +1 prefix. The US is free to change theirs.
I'm just going to nit on your phrasing here. NANP and the associated +1 country code originated from the United States. Technically I am talking about "changing theirs." The fact that it's very reasonably shared with other North American countries in a manner that allows for plenary power on the part of each other member nation is the source of this issue. I'm suggesting the US revise NANP and put more conditions on sharing the +1 country code, although most preferably with a consensus of the other members.
Bad actors in different nations than consumers shouldn't be able to leverage sovereignty or agreements like NANP to be bad actors with impunity.
Great work FCC. Now that all our communications are done over the internet, and ISPs are effectively no longer common carriers [1], you've enabled those internet fast lanes and we'll all get rich.
Just kidding, we will pay more for slower internet. But hey, you alerted us about robocalls, so not your fault right?
How to avoid this scam: Don't answer or return any calls from numbers you don't recognize.
If the FCC is recommending we don't pick up our phones, isn't something really wrong with the system?